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After Honeymoon, the Fight

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Nancy Pelosi's honeymoon is over. Gone are the elegant celebrations of the first female House speaker, the popular bills that sailed through early with bipartisan support, the news conferences touting her victories for the middle class.

The California Democrat faces the first knock-down, drag-out legislative battle of her short tenure as speaker as early as Friday, when she and her leadership team move to push through a closely divided House a $124 billion emergency wartime spending bill. And on the eve of what has been building for weeks as an epic congressional showdown over the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq, she still lacked the votes for victory.

Nearly all Republicans were expected to side with President Bush and oppose the bill, charging that its collection of military readiness conditions, Iraqi benchmarks and waivers amounts to "micromanagement" of the war. And the Republicans may attract the sympathies of a few conservative Democrats.

From the other side, at least a dozen liberal Democrats are attacking the measure for not doing enough to force an end to the war, despite the bill's Aug. 31, 2008, deadline for U.S. withdrawal.

That collection of complaints presents Pelosi with a daunting political calculus. She must persuade at least 218 of the 233 House Democrats to support the legislation, even though many have strong misgivings. It's a risky balancing act that, as of Wednesday, was proving very difficult for Pelosi to pull off, one of her top deputies conceded.

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), the Democratic Caucus chairman, said that party leaders still did not have enough votes to pass the measure, but he was confident they would when the bill reaches the floor.

If Pelosi fails to muster the votes, she risks handing the minority Republicans a major victory and suffering a defeat with personal and political reverberations.

Pelosi remains confident she will prevail. Democratic leaders "are working extremely hard to unify the caucus and pass this bill," said Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly. "We are clearly gaining momentum every day this week."

Pelosi has strong personal views against the war. She voted against the original authorization to use military force in 2002. And like many Democrats, she saw last fall's election as a mandate to end the war. An avowed anti-war liberal, the speaker personally wants to see troops come home now. She backed Pennsylvania Rep. John P. Murtha's November 2005 resolution calling for immediate redeployment.

But a simple bill to cut funding for the war would never gain the support of a majority of the House. There aren't enough lawmakers who share her views. So she tried to craft the next best option: A measure to withdraw by the end of August 2008, coupled with enough presidential waivers to appease moderates.

That compromise is her first clear bid at satisfying her own anti-war views and fulfilling what most Democrats see as their electoral mandate to change the course of the war. If she fails, she would surely draw criticism that she has yet to follow the will of voters and master the legislative cajolery required of House speakers.

So, in her drive for votes, Pelosi has told colleagues privately that if the measure fails, she will move quickly to pass a "clean" spending bill, one without the conditions and requirements for troop withdrawals.

A defeat of her war plan would follow shortly after Democrats attracted only 17 Republicans to their resolution opposing Bush's decision to send more than 21,000 new combat troops to Iraq. Some Democrats had predicted that dozens of Republicans would join them.

Much of the blame for a defeat would fall on Pelosi's shoulders.

She could be faulted for handing too much authority to House Majority Whip James Clyburn (D-S.C.), a low-ranking member of the leadership until a year ago. In November, Pelosi intervened in an expected race for whip between the affable Clyburn and the hard-edged Emanuel. She asked Emanuel to stand down and assume the lesser role of caucus chairman to spare the Democrats a bruising internal battle.

Some Democrats, though, worried at the time that Clyburn was too accommodating and not right for the whip's job, which involves party discipline and has been a steppingstone political position for bare-knuckled leaders such as former Rep. Tom DeLay (R-Texas).

Pelosi could also come under fire for having leaned too far to the right in molding the bill to gain votes. Only one conservative Blue Dog Democrat, Rep. Jim Marshall (Ga.), has said he will oppose it. But at least seven liberal Democrats are vociferously against the bill, including Maxine Waters (Calif.) and John Lewis (Ga.). And many more liberals are leaning in their direction.

Pelosi may have overestimated her influence with her ideological allies. Although she has assured them in closed-door meetings that "this bill will end the war," some simply cannot vote for any continued war funding, no matter how many conditions are attached, seeing it as an immutable aspect of their political identities.